SAVVY SEARCHING - Google Scholar revisited by Peter Jacso, Online Information Review, Vol 32, Issue 1 (2008) [pdf]
Here's gold - a new review by Peter Jacso about Google Scholar. He finds the service still exceedingly shoddy - with this as a particularly damming section --
"the software of Google Scholar keeps doing a very poor job with the highly
structured and tagged scholarly documents. It still has serious deficiencies with basic search operations, does not have any sort options (beyond the questionable relevance ranking). It recklessly offers filtering features by data elements, which are present only in a very small fraction of the records (such as broad subject categories) and/or are often absent and incorrect in Google Scholar even if they are present correctly in the source items."
But "In spite of the appalling deficiencies and shoddiness of its software the free Google Scholar service is of great help in the resource discovery process and can often lead users to the primary documents in their library in print or digital format and/or to open access versions of papers which otherwise would cost more than $30-$40 each through document delivery services."
Posted by Gwen at December 7, 2008 03:30 AM